We had a small group of observers at Lake Sonoma last night under very pleasant conditions including Jim Shields, David Silva, Robert Leyland and Dick Flask. Unfortunately, in a "senior moment" I left my struts behind in my garage (although I remembered to bring along two full boxes of observing guides, charts, atlases, catalogues, etc.). So, Jim and I shared views and starhops using his 17.5" Sky Designs dobsonian.
Jim had brought along a HST image and journal article on M82 which identified the brightest compact, luminous, "super" star clusters near the center this starburst galaxy. These are some of the "stellar" or nearly stellar points superimposed on the mottled disk. The seeing was steady enough early on (or the galaxy well-placed) to identify these clusters other than the brightest near the dark band cutting obliquely through the center.
Next, we did a pretty thorough search of the galaxies near NGC 6826, the Blinking Planetary, with more success -- here's what I recorded:
U11465 = M+08-36-002 = Z257-006 = A1940+50
19 41 42.3 +50 37 56
V = 12.8; Size 1.2x1.2; SB = 13.0
17.5" (9/23/00): At 280x, fairly faint but relatively bright for a UGC galaxy. Appeared fairly small, round, 35" diameter. Even concentration with a relatively large brighter core increasing to a stellar nucleus. Forms an easy pair with M+8-36-3 ~2' SSE just 7' N of 16 Cygni.
PGC 63532
19 41 44.7 +50 37 15
Size 0.2x0.15
17.5": extremely faint and small, round, 5"-10" diameter. Picked up with averted vision close SSE of U11465 [47" SSE of center] about 1/3 of the way on a line to M+8-36-3.
M+08-36-003 = Z257-007 = 3C 402
19 41 46.0 +50 35 45
V = 13.8; Size 0.8x0.7; SB = 12.9
17.5" (9/23/00): faint, very small, round, 15" diameter, faint stellar nucleus. Visible continuously with direct vision at 280x.
CGCG 257-009 = NPM1G +50.0437 = PGC 63568
19 43 30.4 +50 44 21
17.5": extremely faint, very small, elongated 3:2 WNW-ESE, 25"x15", very low even surface brightness. Only visible part of time with averted. This difficult galaxy is located 18' NW of NGC 6826 (Blinking PN) and 20' NE of 16 Cygni in the U11465 group.
CGCG 257-010
19 43 39.5 +50 32 32
17.5" (9/23/00): very faint, small, elongated ~2:1 NNW-SSE, 20"x12". Attached to a mag 12 star at the SSE end and the galaxy appears like a faint flare off the N side of the star. Low, even surface brightness with no noticeable core. Situated just 11' W of NGC 6826 and 17' E of 16 Cygni. A very faint galaxy, CGCG 257-9 lies 12' N.
We took a long look at the "Cave Nebula" - Sharpless 2-155 - which Patrick Moore tagged as one of the top objects in the "Caldwell List" which is clearly ridiculous if you've looked for this object. Anyways, here are my notes:
17.5" (9/23/00): Picked up at 100x surrounding a 7' pair of mag 7.6 and 8.5 stars as a large, roughly circular, low surface brightness glow. Appears slightly brighter around the mag 8.5 star. A very small knot of nebulosity was seen 3' ENE of the mag 8.5 star. Neither the OIII or H-Beta provided any contrast improvement, although there seemed to be a slight improvement with the UHC. The "Cave" section to the east of the bright stars did not stand out as "darker" than other sections of the field although the nebulous glows ends to the east of the small knot.
A faint supernova (SN 2000dk) was discovered just 5 days ago in NGC 383, one of the faint members of the NGC 382 group (also called the Pisces group), a neat chain of galaxies about three and half degrees SSW of Beta Andromedae. I wanted to take another look at this cluster for an upcoming Sky & Tel article, but was mainly hoping to catch a glimpse of the supernova -- only mag V =15.5 near maximum. When we first looked through the 7mm Pentax XL (280x) in Jim's scope the galaxy seemed elongated in the direction of the SN (about 10" NW of the nucleus), but in moments of better seeing, the SN was clearly resolved and similar in brightness to the faint core of N382.